


The deepest wish of my heart

by myrish_lace



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Babies, Children, Drawing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, One Shot, Sketches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 11:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14693037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrish_lace/pseuds/myrish_lace
Summary: Jon Snow has sketched drawings since he was a little boy. He continues the habit throughout his life, capturing different moments in time, at the Wall, with Ygritte, and with his family. His ability to draw disappears once he gives up the North, but comes back in fits and starts. His riskiest drawing is the one that exposes his heart’s desire - to marry his cousin Sansa. He tries to protect it, but one day Sansa confronts him with the sketch. The result is not what he expected.





	The deepest wish of my heart

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic I've been asked to separate from my drabbles collection, so if you read that collection you'll already have seen it. This contains mentions of Jon/Ygritte and Jon/Daenerys as past pairings, but jonsa is endgame. I hope you enjoy it!

Jon draws. He started when he was young, a useful pastime for a bastard boy who needed to stay out of the way.

He hides his pictures from others - drawing and sketching are girls’ pursuits, after all, and he’s already enough of an outsider. He slips up in the godswood, lingering too long to sketch the leaves. Robb finds him, and doubles over laughing at his “tree art.”

It’s easier at the Wall. The men leave each other alone, and he spends countless nights in his room, shivering from cold. He does his best to keep his hand steady as he brings Ghost, the mess hall, Sam and Pyp and Grenn to life. He bites his lip, sketching Ghost’s fur with light strokes as the direwolf reclines by the fire. He tries fire itself next - his fingers are blackened with charcoal before he captures the movement of the flames on paper.

He doesn’t draw Ygritte until after his time with the wildlings is over. He can’t find paper, or the space to sketch privately.

After she dies, Ygritte is all he draws for a year. How her hair fell in her eyes at night, how she squinted when she slung her arrows over her shoulder for a hunt. He conjures up how beautiful she’d looked as she slept next to him in the tent. He’d never been able to tell her, how happy she’d made him, how lovely she was, how he’d stay awake just to watch her sleeping peacefully.

Now he never would.

He doesn’t touch parchment after he comes back from the dead. He’s too afraid he’s changed, forfeited that respite.

Until Sansa throws herself into his arms, and color comes rushing back into the world again.

He draws Brienne in her gleaming armor, Tormund laughing with his head thrown back, the Wall itself. He frowns as he scratches, but the rush of satisfaction he feels when he renders the Wall’s shadows and crevices is exhilarating.

And he draws Sansa. Over and over and over again, like an obsession, stronger even than his drive to draw Ygritte.

Before the battle for Winterfell, when other men are drinking or sharing their tents, he takes out his favorite picture of Sansa. She’s wrapped in his cloak and sipping soup by the fire in Castle Black. She’s warm, and safe. This is why I fight, he thinks. This is why we have to win.

***

They prevail, but almost as quickly Jon as’s elected King in the North he must ride out of Winterfell again, in search of weapons and beasts. He completes one painting during his imprisonment on Dragonstone. He scrapes chalk on the rough cave walls, trying to build a myth that would convince Daenerys to join his cause.

He fails.

After he gives up the North, he can’t draw at all. Not the dragons he’s seen, not the Night King, no matter how extraordinary they are.

And he can’t sketch Daenerys.  She’d love it, to see herself on paper, another form of worship. But he’s given her too many false promises already. And as beautiful as she is, she makes him feel smaller, diminished, trapped.

When he and Daenerys return to Winterfell, Sansa’s there to greet them. His heart constricts at the cold, formal bow she gives him, but he knows it’s what he deserves.

His new parentage knocks the wind from his lungs, sets his world spinning. He tries and tries and tries to draw his new parents, even procures paints for the first time. Rhaegar’s silver hair, Lyanna’s crown of blue roses. He’s desperate to make sense of it somehow, but in the end there's only darkness, emptiness. He crumples up every tear-stained page.

So he picks up charcoal again, because black was always his color. He begins with what he drew as a boy - Winterfell itself. Soon he’s absorbed in the act, pouring Ghost and Bran and Arya onto the parchment. 

It’s still painful. It sinks in that his siblings are actually his cousins, that he’s distant, set apart from them now. Arya gets through to him first. She tells him to bloody get over it. She’ll whack him in the training yard if it will help. And it does.

Bran was lost to him as soon as he returned. He’s the Three-Eyed Raven now, and has no words of comfort for him. Jon sketches him in his wheelchair, eyes rolled back, and a shudder goes through him every time he looks as the portrait.

And Sansa - Jon can’t seem to stop sketching her. He even picks up the paints he threw away in anger in order to evoke her auburn hair, how it shines when she sews next to the fire. He can’t get the knack of it, until he understands the relationship between the light and the soft sheen of her hair. Then he blends reds and oranges and yellows to capture the warm glow. 

When he’s satisfied, he feels like he’s home again, because Sansa and Winterfell are tied together in his heart. He creates portrait after portrait of her, In the great hall, in her study, when she’s stroking Ghost, a small smile on her lips. He almost shows her that drawing, thinks it could bring her some comfort after Lady’s death. But she might ask to see others, and he can’t risk it.Because he’s in love with her.

He kept his drawings hidden before, but now he keeps them under lock and key, because they reveal the deepest wishes of his heart. The most dangerous picture is the one he works hardest on, because he has to close his eyes and imagine it first. He and Sansa are both in the godswood. He’s sweeping his cloak around her shoulders, wedding her, because she’s finally, finally allowing him to protect her, to try to keep her safe and loved.

He trusts Sansa too much, however, and that trust is his undoing. She asks after a letter in his desk one day and he offers her the key absently, absorbed in battle plans.

He glances her way when there’s a long pause. She’s gripping the sketch. Of the two of them, under the weirwood tree. There’s no mistaking it as a marriage ceremony. Her hands are shaking. She holds it out to him, silently.

He gives up. He tells her the truth, because how could the truth be any more damaging than what she’s seen with her own eyes?

He can’t read her expression. She walks slowly over to the fire and tosses the drawing in the flames. They both watch the edges blacken and curl. Jon’s heart sinks.

Them she beckons him over. They stand side by side, not touching. She whispers that Daenerys can’t find out, ever, it’s too dangerous. But maybe, after this war is over, after they’ve survived Daenerys’s wrath about Jon’s, they could make the picture into a song, bring it into the world alive. She offers her hand, and Jon takes it. He laces his fingers with hers, and his heart is full to bursting. They stay there, staring at the fire, until the embers burn out.

***

After the Great War is over, Jon and Sansa rebuild Winterfell. Jon draws his sons and daughters in his mother’s arms. Their firstborn is a dark-haired, blue-eyed book named Robb, solemn and earnest. He’s followed by twin girls, Arya and Lyanna, boisterous redheads with grey eyes. They torment Ghost, who’s older now. He patiently tolerates being ridden like a great horse around Winterfell’s grounds.

Jon discovers his son in his study one spring morning. Robb’s tongue sticks out between his teeth as he scratches on a piece of parchment. Robb hides the paper behind his back but Jon tickles him, elicits a giggle, and Robb shyly shows him a rumpled drawing of Ghost.

Robb hangs his head. He blurts out that he’s sorry, he should spend more time in the training yard. Jon just goes to his desk, takes out one of his pictures of his direwolf, and sits on the floor with Robb.  He talks to him quietly about both drawings, showing him  _your father does this too, he understands, he loves you._

That’s how Sansa finds them. Jon’s head is bent with Robb’s and they’re lost to the world, wrapped up in each other. They don’t notice when she gently closes the door behind her, leaving her two favorite boys together to their pastime.

 


End file.
